A decision-making process for exploring architectural variants in systems engineering
Jérôme Le Noir, Sébastien Madelénat, Grégory Gailliard, Christophe Labreuche, Mathieu Acher, Olivier Barais, Olivier Constant · 2016
In systems engineering, practitioners shall explore numerous architectural alternatives until choosing the most adequate variant. The decision-making process is most of the time a manual, time-consuming, and error-prone activity. The exploration and justification of architectural solutions is ad-hoc and mainly consists in a series of tries and errors on the modeling assets. In this paper, we report on an industrial case study in which we apply variability modeling techniques to automate the assessment and comparison of several candidate architectures (variants). We first describe how we can use a model-based approach such as the Common Variability Language (CVL) to specify the architectural variability. We show that the selection of an architectural variant is a multi-criteria decision problem in which there are numerous interactions (veto, favor, complementary) between criteria.